Editor’s Note
So touchingly brings Arundhati Roy, the most deprived and unfortunate nativities outside the vantage point of human care to the lime light: “She appeared quite suddenly, a little after midnight. No angels sang, no wise men brought gifts. But a million stars rose in the east to herald her arrival. One moment she wasn’t there, and the next – there she was on the concrete pavement, in a crib of litter: silver cigarette foil, a few plastic bags and empty packets of Uncle Chipps. She lay in a pool of light, under a column of swarming neon-lit mosquitoes, naked. Her skin was blue-black, sleek as a baby seal’s. She was wide awake, but perfectly quiet, unusual for someone so tiny. Perhaps, in those first short months of her life, she had already learned that tears, her tears at least, were futile (Ministry of Utmost Happiness).” Arundhati seems completing what the Evangelist omitted in the infancy narrative of the Gospel of Luke! A God accompanying wo/man unto his/her crib of litter is the greatest miracle that can ever happen – the Immanuel event! For God, it is was new way of being God and for humans, a new way of experiencing God. The conventional two dimensional – immanent-transcendent picture of God becomes obsolete and a more life-throbbing three dimensional – immanent-Immanuel-transcendent model becomes the new paradigm.
The etymological roots of Immanuel reveals that it is neither pantheistic nor panentheistic: it simply means, ‘God is with us.’ This is revolutionary in the understanding of God. It flies all the abstract philosophical conceptualizations about God in the wind. Like the transcendental and the immanent extrapolations about God, Immanuel is not a rational statement about God, on the contrary it is a relational statement of God; God in relation with the human beings! As modern anthropology set free man from the iron cage of ‘rational’ to ‘relational’ animal, Immanuel redefines God as the ‘Supernatural Relational.’ The Immanuel concept surprisingly converges God’s transcendence and immanence like a yin yang symmetry. God is transcendental in so far as He is not us but ‘with us’ and nonetheless, immanent as much as He is not above us but ‘with us.’ Notwithstanding, Immanuel is effortlessly in agreement with the Christian understanding of God as ‘communion.’ Thus, a rereading of the entire Bible with footnotes to the Immanuel concept will expose to us that the Biblical God was neither an immanent nor transcendent God but Immanuel: God walked with humans (Gen 3:8); God was with the Israelites in the form of pillars of fire and cloud in the exodus journey (Ex 13:21); the ark of the covenant was the conspicuous presence of God amidst the Israelites (Ex 25: 10-22); through judges, kings, priests and prophets Yahweh continued His accompaniment with His people. In Jesus God sealed this constant rapport with the people of God for ever. Therefore, ‘God-with us’ is the golden ratio where conjuncts the ‘with-in’ and ‘with-out’ dimensions of God in perfect proportion.
The following articles are some random reflections upon the uniqueness of Immanuel event as a path-breaking moment in the history of salvation juxtaposed with God as transcendent and immanent.
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